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I have an external HDD that I formatted from the get go to work in a dual boot situation between Ubuntu 17 and Windows 10. Following is the details of the drive.

It's working fine and as expected on Ubuntu. But on Windows 10 it's not being mounted. It's being recognized as RAW Data.

Following image is of the drive on Ubuntu.

tudor -Reinstate Monica-
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nkh
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2 Answers2

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The drive has been incorrectly prepared/formatted.

The 2.2TB NTFS partition - and the unallocated space after that - strongly suggest "msdos" (MBR) partitioning method which is old, outdated and not proper for such big drives.

For drives of 2.2TB or higher capacity, in practical terms any 3TB drive or more always use GPT partitioning. The full capacity can then be used and formatting it as NTFS will work in Windows and Ubuntu.

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The image from Disks says "Partitioning: Master Boot Record" so that's a pretty clear clue that GabrielaGarcia's right, and switching to GPT should let you use the full disk and hopefully let windows see what's going on.

To convert from MBR to GPT without reformatting & data loss gdisk should work, but you might need a megabyte of free space at the start of the drive. I can't tell if you have that or not from your image (I tried creating a MBR disk with one partition, and both Disks and gparted left 1M before the first partition, so you should have the space... if not I'm sure gdisk will say something).

  • First, backups are always important if you're changing a disk's format / partition layout. If you have any data on the drive that's important, back it up.

The basic instructions are:

  1. run gdisk on the disk
  2. type w to save the changes (which, if you do nothing else, consist of converting from MBR to GPT, which gdisk does automatically)

See the source answer from Rod Smith for more info.

Xen2050
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